What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Akagi]

On 1/29/2022 at 10:45 AM, Cupcake... said:

Had some fun with some teeny weeny little craft.

Enjoy!

 

Cupcake...

*spams like*

[Kebab Kerman]

Made a large transport helicopter. It is difficult to control during landing, and takes some getting used to, but it works, at the very least.

Has two six-bladed coaxial rotors and one set of contra-rotating six-bladed electric propellors, and in the aft cargo bay, it contains some large batteries, an onboard fusion reactor to refill said batteries, and two small fusionpellet tanks. This is my first (functional) helicopter, so there is probably a lot that could be improved.

[Angelo Kerman]

I made a VTOL flying wing from stock and DLC parts:

[king of nowhere]

I decided to do some recon on resources distribution; the good news is, there's water and uranium virtually everywhere. every small body has some water in some biomes, including the moonlets of mars, the asteroids, and every moon of every gas giant. Finding fuel won't be a problem - though the deltaV requirements for everything are still staggering.

Nitrogen is nonexhistant, though. really, there's no nitrogen whatsoever in any planet, with the sole exception of Pluto - which is too far from anywhere to be a useful refueling spot. Tragedy! I need nitrogen to feed my greenhouses.

Well, there is another possible source...

Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, has a nitrogen atmosphere. I can't land the mothership there because its engines are vacuum-optimized, and it would be way too expensive anyway - the map states over 7000 m/s for a rocket. But a dense atmosphere with a low gravity is the ideal environment for a propeller spaceplane. So I went to design one such plane that could land on Titan, harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere, and carry it to orbit in significant amounts. All the while keeping up with the 6-part redundancy policy, where every critical part must have 6 copies - and be able to function with five of them broken - or must be exchangeable by eva construction.

One thing in my favor is that the kerbalism modders have fixed the monopropellant fuel cell issue. namely, until recently, you needed a lot of nitrogen to make monopropellant, and when you used that to run a fuel cell you got back a lot less nitrogen. like, you got one tenth of what you put in.

Now that they fixed that, and you get almost exactly what you put in, I can stop carrying huge, heavy, cumbersome nitrogen tanks by the dozen, and carry monopropellant instead. A'Tuin had 12 big nitrogen tanks, they weighted 2 tons and they stored 3 tons of nitrogen. A single large monopropellant tank stores 3 tons of nitrogen, it's a single part, and it only weights 400 kg. Even better, stress breakdowns can lose 10% of your current storage of a resource, which would be a big problem for a resource that's supposed to last decades. but monopropellant is exempted, so the bulk of my nitrogen will be safe from accidents.

here the spaceplane during preliminary testing. It can rise up to over 50 km altitude on propellers. At that altitude, atmospheric pressure is 0.9 atm. On the right are listed the various processes #

I don't like bringing down the whole setup of industrial machinery required for the process into a spaceplane that must go up and down from Titan - especially because making monoprop consumes water and oxidizer, that I have to bring down from orbit. But those two monoprop tanks hold 6 tons, my mothership holds 24 tons - it's a lot more compared to A'Tuin, but rss has much longer travel time and so I had to scale life support storages up. To get that much nitrogen in pressurized tanks, I'd need over 20 of them, making up for any weight saving. Worse, they are also extremely large, each one being almost as large as a nerv engine. Good luck fitting that with a good aerodinamic profile. And I do need a good aerodinamic profile, because Titan's atmosphere extends to 600 km, and it's still significantly dense up to 200 km.

on the plus side, while a lot of deltaV is needed, little thrust is required, so i can get away with 3 nervs.

So, first test was whether I could fly on Titan at all. It is easy, but I encountered a weird bug on OPM where propellers wouldn't work on Tekto, and rover wheels wouldn't work in some other places, and it would have mightily sucked had my mission depended on it.

Second test was gathering resources. I did some tweaks until I had the right mix of resources and enough power to run everything in reasonable time. It took 8 days to fill the tanks.

Third test, going to orbit. And by the way, titan is awesome

those are hydrocarbon lakes. It should be possible to just put them in the tanks as they are and use them as rocket fuel.

an unfortunate graphic glitch that, I guess, comes from the surface being a collage of multiple orbital pictures taken in different times and conditions.

Fourth - harder - test, the redundancy test. See if the plane can make it to orbit with a broken engine

That one was a chore. I had to load extra reaction wheels to keep the thing straight, and i had to fight the controls through all the ascent - which, being rss, took a lot longer than ascent in stock ksp. But not only I could arrive to a model that works, but I also could save four tons of fuel, so I reduced fuel load in the final design.

Of course, those engines are mounted on docking ports, so that a broken engine can then be swapped for a new one.

The plane has a dry mass of 27 tons, on the plus side I could remove 18 tons of nitrogen drills from the mothership.

Good progress for the day. Next I may work on Venus

# one may notice that there is a single life support, despite the 6 redundancies rule. That's because I don't need life support in this plane. It can go unmanned, do everything remotely. But I also need to bring a kerbal on the ground to plant a flag, and putting a crew cabin on the spaceplane i already need takes two birds with a stone.

If life support breaks, I can still send one kerbal down to the surface, and then back up - it takes a day or so before CO₂ levels in the air rise to dangerous levels. And then do the whole nitrogen refueling by remote control.

 

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, spacejet said:

 

• Pentagon sub-assemblies having Cubic Octagonal Strut root parts.
• 5 way symmetry is intact.
• I have grandparent-strutted everything as that has proven best visually and prevents explosion.
• They are of use to people who like the number 5, or else want to make geo-spheres. A pentagon is almost always needed somewhere for that.
• They will be up on my KerbalX momentarily.

Note - I'll be attempting to make "rootless" pentagons soon, using the "ReCoupler" mod. I do not have a clue if it'll work. Also, 5 way radial symmetry will be lost (I assume).

EDIT: I cannot seem to get ReCoupler to work the way I want, also, it is not clearly stated anywhere, but I suspect ReCoupler must be installed on the end user system. This for me isn't acceptable.

Given your demonstrated level of interest in this you might consider downloading open source Blender and learning how to make part models.  That way the pentagons would be a single part.  As we know, part count is a big factor in whistling up the kraken, ha ha

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[Hyperspace Industries]

Still have a bunch of rocket scientist's block (ideas for stuff to do very welcome), but I changed the usi life support settings so that once you have above 2 years of hab time anyone can stay indefinitely. This is both to make it easier and because I've always found it a little ridiculous that they can stay on a ship for three years, and only then get cabin fever.

I also flew a jet plane, unfortunately the game crashed.

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[ColdJ]

I have him now! Also known as what does a Kerbal flying a Tie advanced look like. ( and yes I know that there is a tradition to have the inside of the window not match to the outside, but I haven't tried it yet, The outside might ruin the view.)

[Zozaf Kerman]

Making my own series on the kerbal space race: KSA (Kerbal Space Administration) vs UKAR ( Union of Kerbal Anarchist Republics)

I don’t have any pictures to show yet, but the video will be up on my channel in the next week or so.

[N_Danger]

 The Niven Mission crew un-docked and prepared to return to Gael. After losing the lander return capsule, it turns out there is plenty of d/v to return.

The crew conducts the trans- Gael burn.

And weeks later we return to Gael.

 

All over but the landing.

[Krazy1]

I'm biome hopping on Moho now. I left the 3 seismic stimulator probes in a high orbit and I'm filling the science-box probe to return to Kerbin.

On 3/15/2022 at 7:11 PM, darthgently said:

2nd chance clean rendezvous if you get control back soon enough

So it turns out that I had a spare rescue craft near Moho already because I forgot that I launched this first one. I'm running 15 contracts. I probably could have gone to  lower orbit to catch up faster but now I don't really have a plan for the first ship... until something else goes wrong.... and it just hit me that I forgot to set an alarm for the 2nd ship  And the second ship is identical, so I hope I have a signal when I get there.

[darthgently]

18 minutes ago, Krazy1 said:

I'm biome hopping on Moho now. I left the 3 seismic stimulator probes in a high orbit and I'm filling the science-box probe to return to Kerbin.

So it turns out that I had a spare rescue craft near Moho already because I forgot that I launched this first one. I'm running 15 contracts. I probably could have gone to  lower orbit to catch up faster but now I don't really have a plan for the first ship... until something else goes wrong.... and it just hit me that I forgot to set an alarm for the 2nd ship  And the second ship is identical, so I hope I have a signal when I get there.

If you are running a 1.12.x with stock construction you could send out a 3rd craft with an engineer and some extra Communitron 88s and upgrade both craft.  I'd think one 88 each would likely improve things enough as you already have some ants attached, but if you put a big relay antenna on the 3rd craft it would clinch it.  And the 3rd craft could become a polar relay sat for Moho.  Maybe even include 3 smaller relay sats for a triangle around the equator with enough relay antenna to reach the polar relay when it is at AP high above Moho.  But don't listen to me, my gaming machine is down and on the back burner so I'm just trying to play vicariously, ha ha

[Krazy1]

6 hours ago, darthgently said:

you could send out a 3rd craft with an engineer

Yeah but these are just tiny 1-seat probes... not worth fixing. I'd just launch another one with an '88. I already have 100G relays at Moho and Eve.  Good luck with your machine. 

Spoiler

PS: I just remembered I'm playing with Moderate difficulty, so the commnet distance is set at 0.8x. The probe is 12.6 Gm from Moho and the Wiki says 2G + 100G range is 14.1 Gm... 14.1 *0.8 = 11.3 Gm. I was playing Normal last career so that's why my intuition was off.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Krazy1

[not enough fuel]

i got my space station set up around duna

 

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[Zacspace]

Busy IRL lately, had a few minutes tonight to refine my space helicopter. Turns out the cure for drag is, as ever, more thrust (and an internal structure that braces the rotors against transverse torque with an offset servo while keeping everything occluded by a fairing). Still doesn't orbit, but it's now in the same problem solving realm as a normal SSTO, so just a little more iteration and I'll have it. It only needs to make low-orbit, it's purpose is to ferry Kerbals between a station and an amphibious aircraft-carrying mobile base (also wip).

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[N_Danger]

Today a probe to Tellumo was sent off to complete a contract for surface science to be transmitted.

In coast mode.

The insertion burn is done such that the PE is moved over the equator.

But it wasn't moved far enough because we have an unplanned liquid landing. (I don't know if it is a water ocean on Tellumo)

So Mission control grabs, then transmits, the airborne science and prepares to find out if the probe floats 

 

And it floats! Then the next Tellumo morning, the surface science is collected and transmitted for the contract completion.